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Plutonium PR

From
Clive Semmens

Gregg Brunskill writes&colon; “All nuclear-reactor fission nuclides have also been found in the Earth’s geological record, especially in the ancient natural reactor at Oklos in Gabon” (6 September, p 25).

This is a nonsense popular with the nuclear industry’s PR people. It is true that some – very few – such nuclides have been found, but almost all the nuclear-reactor fission nuclides have such short half-lives that no detectable trace of them would be left by now, 1.7 billion years after the reactors are supposed to have been operating.

Their ultimate decay products are nuclides normally present in rocks in quantities …